Newsflash – TheClosedCircle will Love, Shine & Die this 2016!

The Spanish rock band TheClosedCircle – produced by Hiili Hiilesmaa – are just about to cut their début album Love, Shine & Die loose into the world.

Never heard of them? I am not surprised. True to their name, this band appears to be very closed. Coming seemingly out of the left field, they are very difficult to pin down. No discernible bio, a web presence so austere, it is difficult to find anything and anyone on it. Good graphics, though. And this is not one of these backroom Black Metal outfits, relishing their anonymous privacy.

Signed to Inverse Records, TheClosedCircle shine by playing some sort of a mid-tempo style rock that – at the outset – is quite catchy, but then gets on the repetitive train relatively quickly. And indeed this appears to be the problem: A bunch of promising tracks, kind of followed through half-way and then thrown on disc just isn’t going to work very well. And to me this is not giving credit to the band’s talent.

It is however easy to listen to this album, nothing wrong with the tracks in this sense. I just don’t feel the oomph, this sub-conscious connection, making you want to consume more of the goodies on offer. And perhaps I have heard the mention “…produced by Hiili Hiilesma…” just one time too many, dammit! There is one thing producing a band and then let them shine, but quite another to try to take undue credit for their work too.

Let’s just hope that the name of the album and the old saying ‘nomen est omen’ does not apply here.